The Productivity Trap I Keep Falling Into

I bought a copy of Visual Studio 6.0 Professional Edition that came in a box. Not a download, not a subscription—an actual cardboard box with installation discs inside. I was working as a LAN engineer in Minnesota at the time, administering computers and software for a small business, and I wanted to learn programming on my own.

I hadn't started in programming and my only experience in tech was administering computers and a few industrial scanners. A few years earlier, I'd been working manufacturing jobs for minimum wage while reading every technology book I could find. Reading those books didn't make me a LAN engineer. Going to school to learn about computers didn't either. What actually changed things was tinkering—building small websites, messing with networking equipment, building a computer, breaking things and fixing them. That's how I got that LAN engineer job. Not from reading about it. From doing it.

So when I bought that boxed copy of Visual Studio, I already understood that learning happens through action. I started building my own little Windows forms apps using Visual Basic—clumsy, probably terrible apps—while still working my day job.

About a year later, we moved to Texas. That's when I started applying for programming jobs, even though I had no professional experience. What I did have: some basic knowledge from Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Databases, HTML and CSS from years of tinkering, and baseline tech knowledge from my work as a LAN engineer. Most companies rejected me. One didn't. Action.

Last week I wrote about the productivity trap (in Spanish), and the irony is that I'm still falling into it. I spend more time organizing information about projects, thinking about the most productive way to approach tasks, planning the work, than actually doing the work. What good is organizing things and using the most productive tools if you never get to the actual task?

Many of us do this. We read endlessly about business, productivity, self-help. We never get to the part that matters: action. Reading is helpful, but it won't change anything unless you apply what you learn.

Productivity tools can help, but they often get in the way. I have to continuously remind myself that what's important is spending time writing the code, editing the image, writing the blog post, not organizing these things in the latest productivity app. The tools themselves aren't the problem. Our obsession with them is.

Focusing on one task and one project has always been challenging for me, especially with my interest in technology. Things evolve and change all the time. It feels like falling behind if you aren't trying the new framework, the new AI model, the new code editor. But to make progress, I have to focus and act on the projects I actually care about, not organize them better so I can theoretically have more time later.
For me, it's almost like an excuse to do everything around the tasks, but not the tasks themselves.

I need to write more, edit more, exercise more, and stop trying to find the best process to be more productive at these things.

The Visual Studio box is long gone, but I still remember what I built with it: an inventory app connected to an MS Access database. Clumsy and imperfect, but mine. I was still working as a LAN engineer in Minnesota. That's when things actually changed.